About

Introducing Dark Horizons: Mechanized Assault Vehicle

Dark Horizons: Mechanized Assault Vehicle is a persistent online futuristic world where you pilot giant Mechanized Assault Vehicles for your faction, honor, glory or the almighty reward of getting paid.

In the Earth's distant future factions continue the fight over resources and power deploying armies of Mechanized Assault Vehicles to hold or take control over the world and off planet resources. No longer are governments the bastions of power, but corporations and renegade factions hold the key to power and life in this dark depiction of the future.

Dark Horizons: Mechnanized Assault Vehicle will be available for Windows and with support from the community we will also bring it to Linux and Mac.

Why Kickstarter?

Ok so lets get this part out of the way. Why are we here reaching out to the community? Currently Max Gaming is working on bringing Dark Horizons: Mechanized Assault Vehicle to life in between contracts and in our spare time. Though we are making great progress, we really want to be able to accelerate our work and get the persistent world online for people to enjoy.

The main goal of this Kickstarter is to bring back what made our 2005 IGF finalist Dark Horizons: Lore so popular with its player, Faction Wars.

Faction Wars is our persistent universe that allows players to work together in pure Player vs Player combat to create a ever changing balance of power in the online universe.

Original Faction Wars persistent map from Dark Horizons: Lore

Original Faction Wars features:

Player Created Units

Faction based recruiting

Capture-able control points and zones

Detailed Unit and Pilot statistics

World chat lobby

Real-time world map showing hot spots

Server Corp for official reporting servers

But we are not only looking to re-implement the old system, but to make additional improvements in its offering including:

Player created contracts

All new achievement based system

Experience System used to unlock ranks and items

Live battle reports from the front lines

Addition of economy system (earn in game currency)

Additional unit creation and management options

Faction and mercenary based units

In addition to Faction Wars, we felt we needed a whole new story behind the universe and are working closely with Arc Dream Publishing to create an all new mythos for this part of the Dark Horizons Universe timeline.

Whats the current status of the game?

Focus on gameplay..

Currently we are focusing on improving the gameplay and balancing of the game using the same engine we used for Lore: Aftermath (released on Instant Action). It is important to us to get it right, and to do this we are inviting anyone who is willing to run Alpha/Beta software to help us in testing, to do so please goto http://www.playmech.com/Beta .

Improving customization

One of the new features we had introduced in Aftermath is the our hangar which was a vast improvement over DH: Lore. We are currently improving the design and making changes based on feedback we are receiving from the community.

Developing AI..

One of the things we missed at in the last mech game (Aftermath) was providing the ability for players to play some single player action where they could improve their skills before jumping into the online experience. With Dark Horizons: Mechanized Assault Vehicle we intend at minimum bots for quick action, but also would like to do a small single player campaign.

Laying ground work for engine upgrade..

While the gameplay and AI testing is going on we are also laying the ground work for upgrading the engine so we can bring the high quality graphics that players expect from this genre.

Why support Mechanized Assault Vehicle?

Most of the current staff has been working on their own time to get the game where is needs to be and we would really like to be able to spend additional time to get the game out. And though this seems to be the year of the mech, it is very hard to get niche games like Dark Horizons: Mechanized Assault Vehicle funded and has hardcore mech fans we want to see more out.

Where does the money go?

We are only asking what we know it will cost us to cover the main goal and each stretch goal of the Kickstarter. The money goes to cover some salaries, contractors for things like additional art, writing and audio. As the funding progresses we will continue to work and show off where we are at.

Why so many small stretch goals?

We want to get the game out in playable stages, allowing us to build community and also since we are a small team it allows us to do live QA with those willing to help. Mainly we want to get you in-game, so we will continue to work as funding of goals happen.

STRETCH GOALS

Though we will continue to work on Dark Horizons: Mechanized Assault Vehicle past the goal of implementation of the online persistent universe, we sure could us some additional help in getting more done.

$30,000 Goal - Platforms and Shiney things

Engine upgrade to improve visual fidelity

Port for Mac/Linux client

$45,000 Goal - Content Expansion 1

4 new mission environments

2 New Mechanized Assault Vehicles

Updated audio fidelity.

$60,000 Goal - Content Expansion 2

4 new mission environment

2 New Mechanized Assault Vehicles

Additional weapons

$75,000 Goal Player Created Content Part 1

Unit logo creator

Paint scheme creator

2 new mission environments

$100,000 Goal Player Created Content Part 2

Player mission editing and submission tool

Unit home bases for PvP challenges

2 New Mission Types

As we see where this Kickstarter goes we may add additional stretch goals, and we appreciate your support.

About Max Gaming Technologies

Max Gaming is a small Independent developer studios based in Ohio, but with remote employs and contractors in the US and Canada. As a company we have delivered over 40 game projects ranging from small technical projects to a full blown flash MMO, and many mobile titles. Our first game was Dark Horizons: Lore released in spring 2004 and was a critically acclaimed 2005 IGF finalist.

External links

Risks and challenges

With any video game there are risks around technology. We have been making games for almost a decade here at Max Gaming and for this project we are sticking with engine technology that we have used since the beginning. The risk lies in the latest version of the technology having issues that we have not yet uncovered.

Our fallback is to leave the project on the current engine version and just update the parts of the renderer that we need. This was a alternative plan to start, but we feel the latest version of Torque 3D provides a much better path for us.

The other risk we have is getting the performance correct on all machines we want to support, but as we have done in the past we will be working closely with testers to tweak the game as much as possible.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge $500 or more
About $500

The Commander - Previous Rewards plus a signed Mech concept by our Artist and you will be immortalized in-game with you name (or a fictional name) included as a AI bot + 2 additional buddy copies (total of 4). Listed a "The Commander" in game credits.